To order a copy of
this issue, click here. To see this issue's table of contents, click
here.
For further inquiries about our journal,
please email us at litfilmquart@salisbury.edu

First there is a blotch of blue smeared at the
center of a black screen and the sound of a clock ticking. And then we
hear Hester Collyer’s trembling though determined voice—

My darling Freddie, a moment ago I knew exactly
what I wanted to say to you. I have run through the letter in my mind so
very often and I wanted to compose something eloquent but the words just
don’t seem to be there. I think that’s because this time I really do
want to die.

This is Terence Davies’s 2011 adaptation of
The Deep Blue Sea,
Terence Rattigan’s celebrated play of 1952. Rachel Weisz plays the lead
role of Hester, a woman whose passion is never fully answered by the one
who is “the whole of life” to her (Rattigan 54).[i]
Within a minute of Davies’s film, along with Hester’s emphasis on her
own time running out, the ticking is more noticeable and the blue that
represents her inescapable grief has filled the screen.

Though the film title is presented as
“Terence Rattigan’s,” this is
Davies’s opening: where the play
begins with Hester having attempted suicide, the film catches her in the
excruciating moments beforehand; where the play begins with the panicked
sounds of Hester’s landlady and neighboring tenants alerted to the smell
of gas, the film begins with Hester’s carefully paced preparations for
death; and where the play begins with the quick-paced rhythm of an
emergency effort, the film begins with an achingly measured focus on
Hester’s resigned words.

Directly after the opening credit sequence of
Davies’s adaptation, we hear the Second Movement of Samuel Barber’s
Violin Concerto (Op.14), a piece that recurs throughout the film and
that compassionately represents Hester’s agony. The first shot after the
opening credits is a grainy image of a dimly lit, run-down street of
London where Hester lives “around 1950.” The half-light evokes tonalist
painting more than an actual location. The film is the idea
of a place and time: the period details are obviously informed by
historical accounts but, right from the beginning, this is a film that
owes more to other artistic representations. The immediate emphasis on
Hester’s voiceover as well the blue that takes over the opening credit
sequence (and which suffuses much of the film thereafter) evokes another
landmark period “woman’s film,” Jane Campion’s The
Piano (1993). The subdued palette
of the grainy mise-en-scène
sets up an immediate contrast with those most celebrated and
vibrant films focused on women and
directed by Douglas Sirk in the 1950s. (All
That Heaven Allows [1955] is
specifically mentioned by Sean O’Connor, the film’s producer, as an
influence in his introduction to the recent tie-in edition of Rattigan’s
play [v].) The recurrent use of Barber’s music sets up a strong
connection between Davies’s adaptation and the use of Rachmaninov in
another revered British film of lovers parting, Brief
Encounter (1945). The film’s
tactile and painterly emphasis on color, place, time, and the presence
of a woman who beautifully, achingly bows to that which oppresses her
immediately resonates with Wong Kar-Wai’s In the
Mood for Love (2000), another
period drama featuring the recurrence of a musical composition (Shigeru
Umebayashi’s “Yumeji’s Theme”) that, like Barber’s music, serves as a
“statement” of that which exceeds verbal expression. The painterly
compositions of Davies’s adaptation also echo his feature film
adaptation that precedes The Deep Blue Sea,
The House ofMirth
(2000): both films represent
aesthetic surprises when compared with the more immediately hard visual
lines in some of his other films, like
Children (1976) for example.[ii]
And the granular images of The
Deep Blue Sea give them a
nostalgic and strangely softened aspect in relation to much of Davies’s
other work, though the overall film also reflects the director’s
consistent attention to emotional confrontationality, memorial depth,
and social resonance.

In this fortieth year of publishing
Literature/Film Quarterly I look
to examples like Davies’s most recent film to explore the purposes of
adaptation studies. I consider how it is that understanding the film as
an adaptation in the broadest intertextual sense enlivens it for me. The
references I have already mentioned are fairly obvious but calling them
to mind changes the film experience: so much so that, for me, the grainy
images of The Deep Blue Sea
seem to take on sharper contours. Some of the other references that
occurred to me while watching the film are oblique: for instance, not
every viewer will connect the bright orange-red coat that Weisz wears in
some otherwise dingy scenes with Davies’s well-known adoration of Albert
Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon
(1956).[iii]
But with such a connection in mind, we might understand Hester’s coat as
the painfully ironic inverse of a little boy’s humanity being answered
in the form of that brightest-of-objects in the drabbest streets of
post-war Paris. Hester will not ever be lifted up like the little boy of
Lamorisse’s fantasy, but Davies’s camera begins high up in the final
sequence of the film when it finds her opening the curtains on a new
day. Davies’s tentative optimism is soon off-set by the image of
Hester’s still war-torn street in the bright morning light, but his
clear focus on her allowing in light suggests the possibility of
recovery, especially if we have the precursor of Lamorisse’s film in
mind.

There are numerous other sources that might
be mentioned in relation to Davies’s film: not only his other
productions, but also the other work of Rattigan, other examples of
classic and contemporary British cinema, and other representations of
London in the 1950s. We might also consider the filmography of Rachel
Weisz: compare her performance of Hester’s vulnerability with her power
as the subject of great love in The
Fountain (2006) or as the
unapologetically manipulative lover in The
Shape of Things (2003). We could
also look again at our most direct source—Rattigan’s original play—from
which much of Davies’s screenplay is directly taken. Finding the shared
text between play and film ironically amplifies the differences between
them. Along with manipulating Rattigan’s story with numerous flashbacks,
the film zeroes in on Hester and on honoring her agony much more
consistently.[iv]
The opening voiceover, for instance, originally comes from the suicide
note that is read aloud by the object of Hester’s adoration, Freddie—in
the play, he not only betrays her by reading it aloud to a friend but
interrupts her words with some derisive asides as he reads it. Such
crucial differences help us understand how much is intentionally at
stake in Davies’s adaptation.

Our primary aim at LFQ
is to contribute to those works we study through finding such points of
contrast and connection. Every essay of this issue is a representative
attempt to reframe a given film, and to provide a new way into
understanding why it matters as a nexus of adapted ideas.

Åke Bergvall’s analysis of
Metropolis is grounded in studying
lost footage from the 1927 film that was discovered in 2008. As Bergvall
shows, this reinstated footage has profound implications for
interpreting the film, especially in terms of its Biblical resonance.
Kristi Branham analyzes John Stahl’s 1934 adaptation of Fannie Hurst’s
1933 novel, Imitation of Life.
(She notes the much greater attention that has been paid to Douglas
Sirk’s 1959 film version.) Branham provides a new analysis of the
maternal characters within both forms of the story because they are
often sidelined in other critical analyses despite being important
embodiments of the “woman question” as well as the “race question.” Carl
C. Curtis, III, begins his essay by acknowledging the historical
liberties taken by David Lean’s
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) while
also stressing the film’s profound influence on perceptions of both
Lawrence and the Arab revolt. In this context, Curtis mentions another
great manipulator of historical truths: Shakespeare. Curtis then
explores just what sort of man is at the heart of Lean’s film—for
Curtis, this Lawrence must be symbolically read as a “man-God,” one who
almost rises to the heights of a deity but who also stumbles over his
own human limits, one who sees himself as “simultaneously nothing and
everything.” Sean Desilets explores the mixed meanings of Jean Cocteau’s
1950 film Orphée,
a version of the Orpheus story in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses. Desilets provides
strong evidence of Cocteau resisting the corporeal emphases of Ovid’s
text in favor of “an aesthetic of withdrawal from the world”—and yet, as
Desilets also shows in his poetic new reading of The Princess, there is
one character who ironically embodies the physical and
artistic possibilities that are respectively reflected in Ovid’s text
and Cocteau’s cinema. Finally, Eric M. Thau examines how Antonio Muñoz
Molina’s second novel of 1987, El
invierno en Lisboa (Winter
in Lisbon), owes more to Classical
American films noir than to those Spanish incarnations of the genre in
vogue during the 1980s. In particular, Thau explores the cinematic
tendencies of Muñoz Molina’s writing as it evokes the
mise-en-scènes, camerawork,
silences, and sounds of Classical American films noir.

Just as considering the numerous precursors
to Davies’s adaptation of The Deep Blue Sea
helps us to perceive its different contours, these articles allow us to
see new contours in several well-known films and texts. We at LFQ
thank the authors of this issue, and of every other issue that has led
to this, our fortieth, year.

[i]
Since the recent edition of Rattigan’s play does not include
line numbers, I have simply provided the page reference. This
quotation comes from a pinnacle point in Hester’s speech about
what Freddie is to her, almost exactly halfway through the play,
in the second of three acts.

[ii]
For some further discussion of The House of Mirth,
see Linda Cahir’s illuminating interview with Davies and his
producer Olivia Stewart (cited below).

[iii]The Deep Blue Sea
might even be read as an adult translation of Davies’s own
reading of The Red Balloon:
“The film shows that you can overcome disaster. What happens to
the balloon is a disaster for the child—which is also what it
feels like watching it. I think the film symbolizes the ecstasy
and terror of childhood and of life, but the end also signifies
hope” (Davies).

[iv]
In his review of The Deep Blue Sea
for Cineaste
(for an issue that spotlights the film with a cover image of
Weisz as Hester), Jonathan Murray emphasizes Davies’s role as
adaptor. He also usefully places Davies’s adaptation of
Rattigan’s play within a context of his other adaptations of
history and literature. Davies’s own somewhat unusual, final
onscreen credit for having “adapted and directed” The Deep Blue Sea
invites us to explore what it represents as a particularly
self-conscious form of adaptation.